Living My Life - Emma Goldman [288]
Lenin’s public confession in regard to Kronstadt did not stop the hunt for the sailors, soldiers, and workers of the defeated city. They were arrested by the hundreds, and the Cheka was again busy “target-shooting.”
Strangely enough, the anarchists had not been mentioned in connexion with the Kronstadt “mutiny.” But at the Tenth Congress Lenin had declared that the most merciless war must be waged against the “petty bourgeoisie,” including the anarchist elements. The anarcho-syndicalist leanings of the labour opposition proved that these tendencies had developed in the Communist Party itself, he had said. Lenin’s call to arms against the anarchists met with immediate response. The Petrograd groups were raided and scores of their members arrested. In addition the Cheka closed the printing and publishing offices of the Golos Truda, belonging to the anarcho-syndicalist branch of our ranks. We had purchased our ticket to Moscow before this happened. When we learned about the wholesale arrests, we decided to stay a little longer in case we too should be wanted. We were not molested, however, perhaps because it was necessary to have a few anarchist celebrities at large to show that only “bandits” were in Soviet prisons.
In Moscow we found all except half a dozen anarchists arrested and the Golos Truda book-store closed. In neither city had any charges been made against our comrades, nor had they been given a hearing or brought to trial. Nevertheless, a number of them had already been sent away to the penitentiary of Samara. Those still in the Butirky and the Taganka prisons were being subjected to the worst persecution and even physical violence. Thus one of our boys, young Kashirin, had been beaten by a Chekist in the presence of the prison warden. Maximov and other anarchists who had fought on the revolutionary fronts, and who were known and respected by many Communists, had been forced to declare a hunger-strike against the terrible conditions.
The first thing we were asked to do on our return to Moscow was to sign a manifesto to the Soviet authorities denouncing the concerted tactics to exterminate our people.
We did so of course, Sasha now as emphatic as I that protests from within Russia by the handful of politicals still out of prison were entirely futile. On the other hand, no effective action could be expected from the Russian masses, even if we could reach them. Years of war, civil strife, and suffering had sapped their vitality, and terror had silenced them into submission. Our recourse, Sasha declared, was Europe and the United States. The time had come when the workers abroad must learn about the shameful betrayal of “October.” The awakened conscience of the proletariat and of other liberal and radical elements in every country must be crystallized into a mighty outcry against the ruthless persecution for opinion’s sake. Only that might stay the hand of the dictatorship. Nothing else could.
This much the martyrdom of Kronstadt had already done for my pal. It had demolished the last vestiges of his belief in the Bolshevik myth. Not only Sasha, but also the other comrades who had formerly defended the Communist methods as inevitable in a revolutionary period, had at last been forced to see the abyss between “October” and the dictatorship.
If only the cost for the profound lesson taught them had not been so terrific, I should have taken comfort in the knowledge that Sasha and I were again united in our stand, and that my Russian comrades hitherto antagonistic to my attitude to the Bolsheviki had now come closer to me. It would be a relief not to have to grope further in distressing isolation and not to feel so alien in the midst of people whom I had known in the past as the ablest among the anarchists, not to have to choke back my thoughts and emotions before the one human being who had shared my life, my ideals, and my labours through our common lot of thirty-two years. But there was the black cross erected